kill a screen session

I'm trying to kill a screen session. I noticed a lot of other related questions, but none of those answers are working for me. I am trying to kill the following session:

screen -ls
There is a screen on: 23520.pts-6.porkypig (09/30/2013 02:49:47 PM) (Detached)
1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-root.
screen -r 23520.pts-6.porkypig

Now I am in the session. According to the documentation:

I am supposed to press "control a" and then "control \". I do that and nothing happens.

Another solution said to press Ctrl+a and type :quit. However, again it doesn't do anything. In fact, pressing control+a, absolutely nothing happens afterwards except a message "No Other Window"

3

11 Answers

first you need to re attach to the screen session
screen -r 23520 as you have done. Then press ctrl + a and then a k and press y when it asks if you really want to kill the session

Source

4

1. Identify the name of the session:

 $ screen -ls

2. Close a session:

$ screen -XS <session-id> quit

• Rationale: -X = Execute command, -S session PID to execute on
• Example: screen -XS 20411 quit
• Source: innaM's Answer

3

This command will kill all screen sessions, if that is desired:

So with all those official suggestions, I have one here that i feel is easier, and just as effective, and kind of more straight forward:

pkill screen

Who wants to go into an unknown and un-needed screen just to press in a couple commands that most might barely remember? This avoids going into it at all, and kills it straight off.

Plus, if you have more than one, this will take them all in one fell swoop.

2

This will kill all the detached screens:

screen -ls | grep detached | cut -d. -f1 | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill

This will kill all screens, attached or detached

screen -ls | grep pts | cut -d. -f1 | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill

Like you, I wanted to kill my screen session and found the documentation unhelpful. Convinced that there must be a keyboard shortcut, I found that
ctrl + a then \
works

I then get the prompt: "Really quit and kill all your windows [y\n]"

I am not sure why the documentation says ctrl + a then ctrl + \. That doesn't do anything for me.

I encountered this problem when updating screen. The screen command would hang when attempting to reattach the session, regardless of how many -D or -R I added to the command. However, screen -ls conveniently provides the pid of the session, allowing you to intervene using the following:

10:42 user ~ $ screen -ls
There is a screen on: 5730.my_screen (Detached)
1 Socket in /tmp/screens/S-user.
10:42 user ~ $ sudo kill 5730
10:43 user ~ $ screen -ls
No Sockets found in /tmp/screens/S-user.

(This is similar to Brian Thomas's answer, but his will kill all running screen sessions, which may not be what you want if you have multiple screens open but only one misbehaving.)

1

You can find the process id of the attached running screen. I found it same as the session id which you can get by command:
screen -ls
And you can use following command to kill that process:
kill [sessionId] or
sudo kill [sessionId]
You can kill the screen even if it is attached on some other terminal window.

we can also use the exit command to terminating screen

1

Press ctrl+d to kill screen window. Repeat this until you kill all screen windows. Once you ran out all windows screen will kill the session and terminating. Shortest solution if you not having many windows

You can just simply type exit while in a recording mode, I found out it to be most convenient as it directly exits the running screen.

Simply, use the exit command inside a screen window and if you have a running process press control + z before that.

1

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